Grant wrote:
Somalis themselves have managed to alienate virtually all the country's friends. The Russians made Afweyne a king in his own country, but a pawn outside.
Kings should at least be able to feed themselves in a drought, something which has not happened since independence. Furthermore, as the 1977 war showed, armaments that are not produced, or at least paid for, at home, don't really count. The country was a net loss even for the Italians, who had to subsidize it from the very beginning.
Let's talk about feeding Somalis before we talk about dominating the Horn.

Somalia hasn't alienated any-one. The Soviets made a strategic gamble by supporting the Ethiopian regime and hoping America and the West would not intervene on behalf of Muslim Somalia against a largely Christian-dominated Ethiopia. And it paid off. Thousands of Cuban Mercenaries supported by thousands more Yemeni troops and paid for in Libyan money guaranteed the defeat of Somalia.
The main strategic blunder Somalia made was placing all its eggs in the Soviet basket. It would have been Wise for Somalia at the time to have similar strategic partnership with the PRC and other Communist-led countries that were not entirely in bed with the Soviet Union. The painful consequences of this folly was felt when we began to run out of armaments as hordes of communists mercenaries pierced through our defenses.
You are right that self-reliance goes a long way in freeing a country but that's a topic for another day. However, we have to remember it wasn't Somalia that betrayed the Soviets. It was the Soviet's that stabbed us in back by siding with an adversary that had strong strategic relations with the West.